Somewhere in Red Gap Part 9

"I had about enough of their h.e.l.ling," declared Jimmie, still glowing with a fine desperation.

They sought the William Street Tunnel under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was cool and dark there. One might smoke and take his ease. And plan! They sprawled on the stone pavement and smoked largely.

"Chee! If we could get out West and do all them fine things!" mused Boogies.

"Let's!" said Jimmie Time.

"Huh!" Boogies gasped blankly at this.

"Let's beat it!"

"Chee!" said Boogies. He stared at this bolder spirit with startled admiration.

"Me--I'm going," declared Jimmie Time stoutly, and waited.

Boogies wavered a tremulous moment.

"I'm going with you," he managed at last.

He blurted the words. They had to rush out to beat down his native caution with quick blows.

"Listen!" said Jimmie Time impressively. "We got money enough to start.

Then we just strike out for the peraries."

"Like the guy in the story!" Boogies glowed at the adept who before his very eyes was turning a beautiful dream into stark reality. He was praying that his own courage to face it would endure.

"You hurry home," commanded Jimmie, "and cop an axe and all the grub you can lay your hands on."

Boogies fell from the heights as he had feared he would.

"Aw, chee!" he said sanely. "And s'pose me stepmother gets her lamps on me! Wouldn't she bean me? Sure she would!"

"Bind her and gag her," said Jimmie promptly. "What's one weak woman?"

"Yah! She's a h.e.l.lion and you know it."

"Listen!" said Jimmie sternly. "If you're going into the wild and lawless life of the peraries with me you got to learn to get things.

Jesse James or Morgan's men could get me that axe and that grub, and not make one-two-three of it."

"Them guys had practice--and likely they never had to go against their stepmothers."

"Do I go alone, then?"

"Well, now--"

"Will you or won't you?"

Boogies drew a fateful breath.

"I'll take a chance. You wait here. If I ain't back in one hour you'll know I been murdered."

"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time with the air of an outlaw chief. "Be off at once."

Boogies was off. And Boogies was back in less than the hour with a delectable bulging meal sack. He was trembling but radiant.

"She seen me gitting away and she yelled her head off," he gasped; "but you bet I never stopped. I just thought of Jesse James and General Grant, and run like h.e.l.l!"

"Good, my man!" said Jimmie Time; and then, with a sudden gleam of the practical, he inventoried the commissary and quartermaster supplies in the sack. He found them to be: One hatchet; one well-used boiled hambone; six greasy sugared crullers; four dill pickles; a bottle of catchup; two tomatoes all but obliterated in transit; two loaves of bread; a flatiron.

Jimmie cast the last item from him.

"Wh'd you bring that for?" he demanded.

"I don't know," confessed Boogies. "I just put it in. Mebbe I was afraid she'd throw it at me when I was making my getaway. It'll be good for cracking nuts if we find any on the peraries. I bet they have nuts!"

"All right, then. You can carry it if you want to, pard."

Jimmie thrust the bundle into Boogies' arms and valiantly led a desperate way to the North River. Boogies panted under his burden as they dodged impatient taxicabs. So they came into the maze of dock traffic by way of Desbrosses Street. The eyes of both were lit by adventure. Jimmie pushed through the crowd on the wharf to a ticket office. A glimpse through a door of the huge shed had given him inspiration. No common ferryboats for them! He had seen the stately river steamer, _Robert Fulton_, gay with flags and bunting, awaiting the throng of excursionists. He recklessly bought tickets. So far, so good.

A momentous start had been made.

At this very interesting point in his discourse to me, however, Boogies began to miss explosions too frequently. From the disorderly jumble of his narrative to this moment I believe I have brought something like the truth; I have caused the widely scattered parts to cohere. After this I could make little of his maunderings.

They were on the crowded boat and the boat steamed up the Hudson River; and they disembarked at a thriving Western town--which, I gather, was Yonkers--because Boogies feared his stepmother might trace him to this boat, and because Jimmie Time became convinced that detectives were on his track, wanting him for the embezzlement of a worn but still practicable uniform of the Western Union Telegraph Company. So it was agreed that they should take to the trackless forest, where there are ways of throwing one's pursuers off the scent; where they would travel by night, guided by the stars, and lay up by day, subsisting on spring water and a little pemmican--source undisclosed. They were not going to be taken alive--that was understood.

They hurried through the streets of this thriving Western town, ultimately boarding an electric car--with a shrewd eye out for the h.e.l.lhounds of the law; and the car took them to the beginning of the frontier, where they found the trackless forest. They reached the depths of this forest after climbing a stone wall; and Jimmie Time said the West looked good to him and that he could already smell the "b'ar steaks br'iling."

Plain enough still, perhaps; but immediately it seemed that a princess had for some time been sharing this great adventure. She was a beautiful golden-haired princess, though quite small, and had flowers in her hair and put some in the cap of Jimmie Time--behind the nickel badge--and said she would make him her court dwarf or jester or knight, or something; only the scout who was with her said this was rather silly and that they had better be getting home or they knew very well what would happen to them. But when they got lost Jimmie Time looked at this scout's rifle and said it was a first-cla.s.s rifle, and would knock an Indian or a wild animal silly.

And the scout smoked a cigarette and got sick by it, and cried something fierce; so they made a fire, and the princess didn't get sick when she smoked hers, but told them a couple of bully stories, like reading in a book, and ate every one of the greasy sugared crullers, because she was a genuine princess, and Boogies thought at this time that maybe the boundless West wasn't what it was cracked up to be; so, after they met the madam, the madam said, well, if they was wanting to go out West they might as well come along here; and they said all right--as long as they was wanting to go out West anyway, why, they might as well come along with her as with anybody else.

And that c.h.i.n.k would mighty soon find out if Little Sure Shot wasn't the real Peruvian doughnuts, because that old murderer would sure have him hard to find, come sundown; still, he was glad he had come along with the madam, because back there it wasn't any job for you, account of getting too fat for the uniform, with every one giving you the laugh that way--and they wouldn't get you a bigger one--.

I left Boogies then, though he seemed not to know it. His needle worked swiftly on the red one he was making for the madam, and his aimless, random phrases seemed to flow as before; but I knew now where to apply for the details that had been too many for his slender gift of narrative.

At four that afternoon Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, accompanied by one Buck Devine, a valued retainer, rode into the yard and dismounted. She at once looked searchingly about her. Then she raised her voice, which is a carrying voice even when not raised: "You, Jimmie Time!"

Once was enough. The door of the bunk house swung slowly open and the disgraced one appeared in all his shameful panoply. The cap was pulled well down over a face hopelessly embittered. The shrunken little figure drooped.

"None of that hiding out!" admonished his judge. "You keep standing round out here where decent folks can look at you and see what a bad boy you are."

With a glance she identified me as one of the decent she would have edified. Jimmie Time muttered evilly in undertones and slouched forward, head down.

"Ain't he the hostile wretch?" called Buck Devine, who stood with the horses. He spoke with a florid but false admiration.

Jimmie Time, snarling, turned on him: "You go to--."

I perceived that Lew Wee the night before had delicately indicated by a mere initial letter a bad word that could fall trippingly from the lips of Jimmie.

"Sure!" agreed Buck Devine cordially. "And say, take this here telegram up to the corner of Broadway and Harlem; and move lively now--don't you stop to read any of them nickel liberries."